After dinner, to the tangled garden for rosebuds or early magnolias, whose cloying fragrance will always bring back to me the full zest of those summer days; then dress-parade and a little drill as the day grew cool.

In the evening, tea; and then the piazza or the fireside, as the case might be,--chess, cards,--perhaps a little music by aid of the assistant surgeon's melodeon, a few pages of Jean Paul's "Titan," almost my only book, and carefully husbanded,--perhaps a mail, with its infinite felicities.

Such was our day.
Night brought its own fascinations, more solitary and profound.

The darker they were, the more clearly it was our duty to visit the pickets.

The paths that had grown so familiar by day seemed a wholly new labyrinth by night; and every added shade of darkness seemed to shift and complicate them all anew, till at last man's skill grew utterly baffled, and the clew must be left to the instinct of the horse.